Hanna

By AARON MESH

Best things first: I see no reason why every movie shouldn’t be filmed in a rusting, abandoned German amusement park. East Berlin’s Spreepark does wonders for the final act of director Joe Wright’s Hanna, which includes some jaw-dropping visuals—including Cate Blanchett walking down train tracks that emerge from the moldering jaw of a giant wolf. If there were an Oscar for location scouting, Hanna would be the 2011 front-runner; as it is, the eerie moonscapes throughout the film (Finnish ice floes, orange-tiled Berlin subway stations, granite military compounds under the Moroccan desert) help compensate for a script that feels a little too eager to be a punky parable. It’s about a pale, blond teen (Saoirse Ronan) bred and trained to be a killer. As she pursues U.S. government operative Blanchett at the behest of her woodsman/secret agent dad (Eric Bana), the film pulses to a score by the Chemical Brothers, who have also written an earworm of a cabaret motif, whistled by a sadistic Weimar pansexual (Tom Hollander). You might ask what a sadistic Weimar pansexual is doing here, and didn’t that stereotype die out some time ago, but you’d be missing out on the zest of the thing. But, much like Wright and Ronan's Atonement, this picture is too mannered to make an emotional impact. It’s an empty fun park.